by Sara Dahmen
The blacksmith nods amiably at Father, and turns back into the heart of town. Al and Tom grab the oxen’s heads and we move as one to follow Walter. Around us, the other wagons have already melted into the path heading up to the old Indian hunting ground. One other wagon is staying, like us, and parked in front of the closest saloon, a freshly painted new building called The Powdered Keg. It’s the Winters family: Matthew, his children and wife Mary, and Mary’s widowed sister Doris Tucker, along with Matthew’s dashing brother, Tommy. Today, Tommy’s sporting an elaborate mustachio for the arrival into Flats Town. Doris giggles at him and shoves her fluffy breasts into his face as he lifts her easily out of the wagon. Tommy ignores her completely as he eyes up a group of cowboys passing by, copying their swagger as he follows the rest of his family inside the Keg, only losing his balance as he walks through the door.
There is a solid main street stretching west and east: wide, flat, and with a curve at the end emptying to more homes. The Powdered Keg saloon sits across from several buildings. One is a big mercantile. There’s a bank and a small post office, and about fifty children scrambling around the alleys between sod homes and freshly sawn board homes. Is there a school? I peer between the dust and the houses but cannot see one. A church on the far west is in the middle of gaining a steeple, and I see the telltale spire of another chapel ahead of us.
A hugely busty woman cuts Tom off, and he curses in Polish just loud enough for us to hear him, but the woman pays him no mind and hustles into the bank without pausing. The wind shifts from behind us, and suddenly the potency of a tannery’s smell swarms the air. Instinctively, I put my sleeve to my nose, and my eyes water. We take a dirt path between the general store and the bank and onto a narrower, newer road that runs parallel to the main street. I see the darkened windows of a makeshift bordello, and inhale the stink of the saloon and a dilapidated mess hall spills greasy smoke of bacon gone black. A middle-aged man sweeps the back porch of the general store. It seems he’s doing so as an excuse to watch us straggle into town, because he’s staring at everyone instead of at his broom.
A sprawl of houses creeps around the outskirts, where the prairie’s silky grass slowly melts into distant trees up on the old buffalo jump. The wagons there are creamy blobs, their canvases swaying in the breeze. Some farms pepper the fields about, lumpy sod buildings sagging and flat. While there is comfort in the town’s growth, I almost wish I could go running up to the wagon train, and let it carry me to the end of the line and back again. Being in Flats Town is so final and finishing. There’s no returning to Chicago. I’m a pioneer now, a woman of the west with absolutely no way to go back on my own. My life must pick up its place and grow. The knowing of this does nothing to quell my worries.
Will they think I’ve gone insane if I start to sob? Will my brothers shake their heads against my fears?
“New?”
I start, and pivot on my heel as I walk, finding the sharp eyes of a very slim, middle-aged man who is staring at my chest instead of my face.
“I … I’d think that was obvious,” I say shortly, glancing up to see if Tom or Al notices I’m accosted by a stranger. They don’t, their attention stuck on pulling the oxen carefully through the path around a ramshackle old church-like building with new stairs built up to the door. Scrawled into the wood is the word “SCHOOL.”
“Sass, is it?” he spits to the side and grins at me through yellowed teeth.
“I’m not sassy!” I retort.
“Ohhh, and spicy too!”
“Horeb Harvey, get your ass over to the lumberyard before Mikey decides to finally fire you!” A young man at a cooper’s bench yells across the streets, and my companion makes a wrinkly face.
“You my wife now, young Franklin? You watch your own business!”
“I only know that Mikey O’Donnell’s temper is worse than Lettie Zalenski’s and you don’t need me telling you that that’s saying something.”
“I’m going, I’m going,” Horeb leers at me just as a wide hand claps him hard on his shoulder.
“Ain’t. Go on.” The new arrival, a chubbier, thicker, man who looks to be the same age as Mr. Harvey, with a mop of blonde hair going grey, peers at me from under shaggy brows.
“How do.” He tips fingers to his forehead. “Gilroy Greenman.”
I press my mouth together hard, and then open it to offer some polite niceties, but Gilroy Greenman steers Horeb away from my side swiftly before I can answer.
Alone again, I let out a breath and glance around the second street. Some of the buildings in this area are made of wood in various stages of aging with long, sloping porches. Two cowboys speak earnestly to a well-dressed man next to a blunt-sided livery in the distance ahead, and a group of young women are making eyes at the two ranchers. Their gowns are surprisingly fresh and pretty, but the fashions are at least a decade old if I remember correctly from Chicago.
Men in leathers stroll past, their heads together and the tops of their hats kissing as they bend toward one another, heading toward the mercantile. I catch snippets of their conversation—“railroad” and “bison”—and then they are gone, into the general store.
We hear the blacksmith shop long before we see it. There is a ringing of metal hitting metal, and the blow and belch of smoke from the forge. It is an unmistakable and homey smell, and a small part of me relaxes. For how strong and quick this town is growing, I am at once grateful and amazed there is no other tinsmith already here peddling wares.
“Tadeusz. And Jimmy, too. They are arrived.” Walter announces.
Two younger smiths turn from their work, heavy aprons stained with black, and their faces sweating even with the coolness of the morning. One is tall, massive, and broad like Walter, and the other slim and sinewy, with a bounce to his movements.
“This is my son, Tadeusz,” Walter gestures to the taller of the two. The likeness is obvious, though Walter’s beard is white and his son’s is black.
He approaches us, his hands absently wiping on his leathers and his eyes searching us all: perhaps measuring his height against Tom, and his weight against Father, and judging Al’s grin. His gaze flickers over me as well, a cursory, uninterested, swipe, and then he shakes Father’s hand, a grim half-smile tracing his face briefly.
“Finally. You’ve come.” He releases Father, and gestures behind him. “Jimmy will be glad to hand off his work to you.” We all look about and see the pale white glimmer of tin against the sooty grey of the workshop.
“You be taking care of tinware then?” Father’s eyes narrow, and he looks to Walter for confirmation.
The older man nods, and a rueful smile grows. “We’ve been acting as blacksmiths and tinkers both. Repairs mostly, as anyone wants new they have to order it through a wagon master or relatives back east. It will be a relief to let you handle the softer stuff. We don’t have the touch of it.”
“So long as your repairs don’t be leaking, maybe you are being able to get away with it.” I can see Father already wishes to inspect the bit of tin in the shop to fix it himself, to save the weaker metal from improper hammering and puckers from dented stakes and anvils.
“There have only been a few complaints,” Walter admits, then waves his hand. “Tadeusz is right, Jimmy. No need for you to keep working on the tin. You may as well start heating some of the rods for shoes while Tadeusz and I take them out back. Consider your apprenticeship to move up a peg.”
The younger man smiles, a bright, brilliant flash of white happiness reaching across the space. “That sounds just fine, sir.” He is so pale and small compared to the Salomons. I wonder who his people are, or how far he traveled to take this apprenticeship.
Once again, we march behind Father and Walter, though this time we add the steps of his son, who falls in between us.
“So, Tadeusz, is it?” Al is, of course, the first to jump into the quiet.
“Father uses it. Call me Thaddeus.”
“Not Ted?” Al’s flippancy feels out of plac
e against the serious face of the blacksmith’s son, who instead sends a withering glance.
“No.”
“Well, we go by Al and Tom. And Marie.” He gives our English names. As always, I am just a heartbeat behind in the list. “We know you won’t remember our names right away—”
“Marie, Tom and Al,” he recites back. “I’ll recall.”
The building is behind the combined house and blacksmith’s shop, with a wide patchy lawn hemmed in by fences for the smithy’s small farm. I immediately see the worth of our location for all that it is borrowed from Walter. There is a meandering stream bubbling across the property west to east, serving as both water for the people, animals, and hot iron. Though it seems drafty, and the roof looks as though it will only last another winter or two, the wide front doors of Walter’s extra building open into a generous cavern.
No one says it, but I can feel the thread of anxiety still running through each of us. Though we will not have to build a new house, and a new shop this season, the amount of labor needed to make the place fully livable is enormous. When the word ‘barn’ had been mentioned, I had expected a round-roofed, long, structure familiar in the fields of Wisconsin and Illinois, perhaps stained a deep red-brown. This is nothing like that. The rough, planked, walls have shrunk with time to leave wide gaps, the ground is churned dirt, and hay rots in the corners. Holes of light puncture into the dim space. Suddenly, I shiver against the imagined cold of winter that will blast through the wide spaces between the boards, and imagine the ceiling give way to drifts of snow and ice.
How much work will we need to do before my brothers can set up the kettles and the tools? Concern gnaws at the corners of my stomach, and I inch a finger into my mouth, worrying at the corner of a nail.
“Tadeusz, why don’t you show them the place?” Walter offers, and my brothers string out behind Thaddeus as he explains window repairs needed, and the ventilation to be created, and how we can salvage the handful of rough tables stacked along a dusty wall.
I’m not a tinsmith, for all my lessons with Al, and though I wish I could listen and think about the placement of stakes and tin sheet, I must be silent. Strangely, I feel chafed by the restrictions of my sex. How odd. I’ve never felt so constrained before. I must truly be spoiled by the freeness of the wagon train!
“Stanisław. So. I must tell you.” Walter’s voice, though not as melodious as his son’s, carries to me where I wait by the doorway.
“What is it?”
“This space. I do not own it. Not any longer. I did when I last wrote to you, but I had to sell it.”
“Sell it? Then we are not staying here?” Father’s voice holds ill-concealed panic.
“No, no. I managed to speak to the new owner and he agreed to leave you here, at least for the winter.”
“What is he wanting with a barn if not to be using it?” Father sounds as incredulous as I feel. Without meaning to, I start to inch closer to listen better.
“He wishes to own as much land as possible. He is a rancher. I owed money … I needed hard cash, not just traded goods. Selling the land was the best way to get it. You’ll find the banker here—Percival Davies—drives a hard bargain.”
“Do we be needing to meet this new landlord? Paying rent?”
As Father asks, Walter has the grace to look uncomfortable. Father, nearly a full head shorter, glowers up.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Yet.” Walter rubs his hand around his neck. “He or his son will probably be around at some point to negotiate. Old Oddvar knew you’d be coming in soon enough. But it’s a good space, Stanisław. It is.” This is a plead, a beg. “I wanted you here for many reasons.”
“It is a right time to be coming,” Father amends. “We can be going in then, and be seeing your wife. Monika—yes?”
Walter still looks uncomfortable, and now his long mouth tightens further under the greying beard.
“She’s gone, Stanley, a few months past. Like your Jozefa. Died of the dysentery.”
“Mój Boże, człowieku. My God, man.” Father does not press his sympathy further, but his voice goes deeper. I know if I glance over again, he will be standing there, forlorn himself, and buried in memory. They are quiet for a long moment, and I feel the history between them settle and ferment. I think if Mother were here, she might have embraced Walter, for all his surliness, and would have promised to take care of him and his son as well. I seem to always know what she would have done, but can never make my mouth or feet follow her ghostly footsteps.
“It is a strange thing, is it not, to be here in a growing country exactly as we’d hoped, but to have lost so much?” Walter finally speaks again against the murmuring of the boys in the back of the barn.
“We have our sons,” Father reasons, as if determined now to stay cheerful in spite of the low news. “And I have Marya.”
They fall silent once more, and the deeper roll of Thaddeus’s voice bumps toward us. He explains the best way to get lumber: sweet-talk old Mikey O’Donnell for a good price on planed wood by offering any nice knives we have on hand—the man has a penchant for collecting them. Or barring that, offer to help his wife Lara organize a church social to get good credit. Or there is the bank if we need money for lumber.
If! We need a full loan to pay for the repairs on this oversized shack! This so-called barn structure has a lofty, beamed ceiling, and feels like it has been vacant for many seasons. The twirled straw and grass nests of mice in the corners wilt, and the wooden slabs along the walls are going gray with years. The wind pokes through the open knots of the planks by the one easterly window facing the short prairie and wood beyond the farmyard. It’s big, surely, but it’s dirty and musty and the wood is half-eaten by termites on the north end.
I wonder how we can possibly make this feel like a professional shop, let alone a home.
We can’t. At least, not without help.
I sigh inwardly, and press my hands into my skirts, chewing the insides of my mouth. I know the sinking in my gut is the chafing of the unavoidable. I am to be relegated back to the hearth and the kitchen. Al will not have time to teach me much more tinning, and my brothers will marry and drift away, leaving me to care for Father without Mother’s bright tinkling joy to lighten the days. My future is not undesirable, but I feel disjointed with it. I wish I could create, to feel some sense of the euphoria I had when tinkering with metal. I wish to have that confidence again, somehow. A silly dream, I know.
Father paces over to the door, then draws back, surprised to see me so near. I smile at him lightly, but he shifts his chin to the side, eyes narrowed.
“You are being here standing the whole time, Marie?”
“I have,” I admit, bending my head slightly in guilt of eavesdropping, but I’m not so embarrassed I can’t speak up. “And … Father. We can’t afford the lumber, can we?”
Father glances away at once, and Walter looms behind him, his face unreadable and flat.
“We can’t do this!” I whisper, hoping the boys don’t hear me. “We need a better place!”
“There isn’t one. Not right now,” Walter inserts himself into the conversation, and a brief bout of resentment flashes through me with his interruption.
“What do you mean, there’s no other place?” I ask, resting my arms across my chest and meet his eyes frankly. “There’s not an empty house we could use? Something better than this piece of gówno shit that will need a loan just to make it livable?”
“The words you are using my daughter!”
Walter’s white-tipped eyebrows reach his hairline, but he holds his tongue.
“Well, it’s true!” I hiss against the rumbling of the four young men on the far end of the room. Hasn’t Tom at least done any of the math needed for the repairs? “It’s useless! We can’t stay in a big old shack!”
“You could take out a larger loan and build something from scratch,” Walter says tightly.
“I am not wanting a loan first thing in coming.�
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“We’ll need one if we stay here,” I say, worry mingling with stubbornness as I pull myself up, almost able to look at Father in the eye. “We can’t have it both ways—and lumber isn’t free!”
“Marie, I am knowing what it is taking to make this good to live.”
“It’ll take weeks! All the rest of summer or fall, won’t it?” I glance around. “Does anyone know how to repair the roof? It’s too much—”
“It is being better than nothing.” Father cuts me off, and glances at Walter. “I am sorry, my Jozefa is always very bright, and speaking her mind and was teaching my daughter to be so, but she is not here to be telling Marie when it is no good to speak of such things.”
My lips smack together, and I hold in another unbecoming cuss, fuming at Father’s response and the hugeness of the task ahead of us. The two old men stand silently for a long moment, shifting their feet and looking anywhere but at me or one another.
“We’ll help you unload the wagon,” Walter finally offers, as though it will take the sting from all his disappointing information. “And get your animals unhitched. Jimmy will have started the meal. An apprentice is good for more than the grunt work.”
“Well, then,” Father sighs. “Marie, why don’t you start to be unloading?”
Knowing my words will fall needlessly at this point, I move woodenly into the wagon and pull the lighter items down: the copper and tin lanterns, the rolls of bedding wedged between the larger crates, and the travel-bitter blankets. Then the small box holding the ruined burring machine.
Oh heaven. What will these blacksmiths think of me and my stupidity?
The boys join me soon, jostling and clamoring with Thaddeus among them.
“Hah! Tonight, we’ll get a break from your cooking, Marie,” Tom thunders jovially, as he takes some of the smaller boxes down. “Thaddeus says Jimmy has a way in the kitchen.”
“He does,” the blacksmith confirms, his gaze resting on my hands as I shift the next few items toward the edge of the wagon. “Some of the best cornbread and roasted rabbit around.”
